Meerkat tale a sobering reminder for SXSW startups

Meerkat is a fast-rising, Twitter-centric live video broadcasting platform. Viewers of your livestream can tweet at you and have those tweets appear on your screen while broadcasting live.
(Kaveh Rezaei, USA TODAY)

SXSW 2015- Ben Rubin, CEO and Founder of Meerkat, the live video streaming service that piggybacks off of Twitter, during a session(Photo: Jack Gruber, USAT)

Meerkat was but a couple of weeks old when this promising app that let users broadcast a stream live over a smartphone took Austin by storm. The oversized reception Meerkat received in March 2015 during SXSW startled even CEO Ben Rubin, who had only decided to attend the interactive confab at the last minute.

The magic was fleeting. By the end of that March, Twitter unleashed its own rival livestreaming app Periscope. Come summer, Facebook plunged into livestreaming with Facebook Live.

The proverbial writing was on the wall. Three weeks ago, Rubin dispatched email to investors announcing a strategic change of course for his company, Life On Air, which prior to launching Meerkat shortly before SXSW had built a handful of other livestreaming products, one of which was called Yevvo. (Meerkat was so named because the creature was commonly referred to as the "most social animal.")

The Meerkat saga and rise and fall of other SXSW startups that once stole the show —remember Highlight, the social app that aimed to help connect you to people nearby who shared something in common with you? — provides a sobering lesson for the companies clamoring for attention in Austin this time around, and frankly for those of us in the media who may prematurely declare the next, next big thing.

As Rubin wrote in his email to investors: After starting on a “high note with the rapid explosion of live video …it became rougher waters — mobile broadcast video hasn’t quite exploded as quickly as we’d hoped. The distribution advantages of Twitter/Periscope and Facebook Live drew more early users to them away from us and we were not able to grow as quickly alongside as we had planned.”

It wasn't for lack of trying. Meerkat which is based in SF and has about 30 employees, tried differentiating itself these past 12 months. In June, it added a feature that let commercial broadcasters embed streams into their own webpages and blogs, functionality that Discovery Channel debuted in conjunction with its popular Shark Week feeding frenzy. The idea was that shark experts would use Meerkat to stream content over Sharkweek.com that would complement the programming that Discovery broadcast on its network.

There were “made for Meerkat” shows from Hulu, The Weather Channel and TMZ. In August, Meerkat announced GoPro integration.

Greylock Partners led the $14 million round of fundraising for Meerkat that was completed shortly after SXSW last year. Greylock's Josh Elman was betting on Meerkat becoming the "foundation of what I hope will become a powerful new network" ... (and for viewers) "an amazing alternative to other kinds of entertainment and engagement."

During an interview on the eve of this upcoming SXSW, Rubin said the various efforts indeed helped grow Meerkat, just not enough.

In May, Meerkat had two million downloads, the last public number the company released. At its peak, about 100,000 broadcasters used the service, according to an estimate published in the Re/Code tech news site.

Meerkat app is available for IOS and Google.(Photo: Meerkat)

Rival Periscope, as of August, claimed 10 million accounts..

Rubin says what he has learned from Meerkat's users over the past year, is that “one-to-many” live broadcasting doesn't work for 99% of the audience. He thinks the only users that it mostly makes sense for are people in the media, news business, and celebrities.

"Twitter and Facebook rushing into the space…didn’t help (us) but it’s not the reason why we did the change,” he says.

Rubin wouldn’t reveal much about just what that change will entail, but he insists that his company will have sustaining power. “Our vision, our statement, our team is here to stay.”

The new product under development will be in Rubin’s words “very radical” when it is unveiled in about three months. He calls it a social network with people you know where everybody is live.

Meantime, the Meerkat app doesn't go away. The company plans to continue to support the existing app, “as it is.”

Rubin planned to head back to Austin this weekend where he expected his experience will be “exponentially lower key” compared to a year ago. Looking back, he says, “I think (SXSW) was a blessing. We got a lot of momentum out of it. It was great. We never planned to go to South By. But I wouldn’t do it any other way. “